Composting Layers of Christchurch History

Abstract

This is a poetic compost story. It is a situated tale of how I gradually began to shred my fantasy of being a self-contained responsible individual so I could become a more fruitful response-able Pākehā (for the purposes of this paper, a descendant of colonial settlers or colonial settler) from Christchurch (the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand), Aotearoa (The Māori (the Indigenous people of New Zealand) name for New Zealand) New Zealand. Poetic compost storying is a way for me to turn over Donna Haraway’s composting ethico-onto-epistemology with critical family history and critical autoethnography methodologies. To this end, I, in this piece, trace how I foolishly believed that I could separate myself from my colonial family and history only to find that I was reinscribing Western fantasies of transcendence. I learnt by composting, rather than trying to escape my past, that I could become a more response-able Pākehā and family member.

1. Introduction

All manner of critters and lifeforms wriggle around in this natural cultural situated compost pile (Haraway 2016): Words made from keyboards, angry mouths, blood red flesh, sea and estuary smells collide. It is a bumpy, sometimes humble, sometimes bumptious compost (see Haraway 2016). It is without soft rhythm or harmonious happy endings. It is slushy and cold in the shade. It is dry and barren when the sun hits and the mud is baked dry, along with the eroded bare hills, knaggy lifeless soil and the lips of people that speak too much or not enough.

Still, the shade is a relief from the bright sun and the slushiness breeds many fertile lifeworlds that live quite happily in the muddy holes in the broken pavements in east Christchurch. In the winter, the bare hills warm people’s backs and the smell of the ocean is vitally uplifting. The people too, in this compost, once they have finished shouting and raving, hold each other in the warmest of embraces and the laughter that erupts is so infectious it reverberates and taints and stains any imagined ‘purity’ running through minds and bushy wet mountains.

Compost storying is Haraway’s (2016) latest call for salvaging, and staying with, troubled worlds. It is about response-able composing and decomposing wherein rich matter and meaningful matters are already entwined. Haraway’s (2016, p. 31) composting philosophy pierces the boundaries of the self-contained human figure in Western traditions, making way for theories from mud and muddles that are always in the making.

Vitally, for this chapter, composting is about what we, earth critters, ‘inherit in the flesh’. That is to say, composting is a recognition that we—human and not—inherit whom we touch within any encounter. In this sense, “partners do not precede the knotting; species of all kinds are consequent upon worldly subject […] shaping entanglements” (Haraway 2016, p. 13). Such collisions, are at times violent and certainly non-innocent but find fertility in their contingency and capabilities of response (Haraway 2008, 2016).

I use composting in this article to work out “how to face settler heritage differently” (Haraway 2011, p. 5) by adding to the Harawayan compost pile, Bell’s (2014, pp. 174–75) and Rose’s (2004, pp. 12–13) meditations on Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of responsibility within their work on Indigenous-settler colonial relations. In particular, I am interested in the way Bell and Rose take up his provocation that we (in Levinas’ case, humans) are already responsible for others, an insight that resonates with Haraway’s (2008, 2016) and Barad’s (2010, 2014) arguments that nothing exists before relation (human or not), the foundation of which informs both theorists’ sense of response-ability.

My own sense of response-ability was aroused whilst scrambling around in the Tararua Ranges1 and by my family in Christchurch that demanded attention. I had attempted to pretend I was not from where I was from; that I was not another violent compost layer of Canterbury2. I tried to tell myself that it was not my responsibility that my ancestors took part in irreparably devastating Kāi Tahu3 livelihoods, because I was not them. Realising the folly of my self-contained pretence, my exterior began to tear, leak, decompose.

Two broad methodological strands are vital accomplices for my (de)composition, the first one being Sleeter’s (2015, 2020) ‘critical family history’. Sleeter’s critical family history is important for White scholars in particular, given her own argument that there is a lack of social and cultural context in the work many White researchers produce when exploring their own family histories. The ‘critical’ in critical family history aims to address this and confront any desires by White cultures to erase, or gloss over, for example, how one’s genealogy is situated racially. In the case of Pākehā, ‘critical family history’ is necessary in accounting for the colonial context in which ancestral families lived.

The other fecund methodological thread in this composting pile—closely aligned to critical family history—is critical autoethnography. Critical autoethnography was a necessary way for me to explore what troubled me about my family. In this sense, I use critical autoethnography in this piece not as a way to link the singular (‘self’) to the universal (see Denzin 2003, p. 268), a common interpretation of autoethnography. Rather, the critical autoethnography used here is implicitly relational and situated, drawing on critical theory to interrogate one’s place in the world (Jones and Harris 2018; Mackinlay 2019). Put simply, critical autoethnography is a composting collaborator, being an uncertain tricky enterprise (Mackinlay 2019) that ‘stay’s with one’s troubles’ (Haraway 2016). In fact, whilst writing a draft of this article in academic prose, trouble rose as I realised my writing was not evoking what I wanted it to and I was compelled to change form; but as Liz Mackinlay (2019, p. 11) says:

[T]here is always already uncertainty around what [critical autoethnographic writing] will be. Will [it] take the form of a short story, poetry, fiction, novel, photographic or visual essay, script, personal essay, journal, fragmented and layered writing, and social science prose […] or perhaps all of these things at once?

I am drawn to Mackinlay’s words, particularly the ones about fragmentation and layering. These are the compost methodologies I use in this paper as I “ruthlessly” (Mackinlay 2019, p. 11) ripped up most of the words I had written to form a sense of fragmentation, layering, composing and decomposing (see Haraway 2016).

Thus, this article takes a poetic shape, weaving theory with story in an attempt to illustrate how composting breaks down the Western binary between words and flesh, or matters and matter (Haraway 2016). I use composting in this piece then, to show how I learnt the fertility of response-ability through encounters with my family and the unsettled violence that we have inherited as Pākehā from Christchurch New Zealand.

2. Compost Layer One: Responsibility

• It is Christchurch, Canterbury, in the 1990s.
• The heavy weight of responsibility
• pulls my shoulders down
• as I watch my mother
• sit in her chair.
• She is not angry anymore
• what a quiet
• Shameful relief.
• How can I escape?

• The fire of rage has dissipated.
• Soon she will fade away entirely
• and be brought back to life by
• electroconvulsive therapy.
• ECT.
• How can I escape?

• I am desperate
• to make her happy
• but I can’t.
• How can I escape?

• I can’t ease her suffering
• of being
• a mad solo mother beneficiary
• with three daughters
• during Ruth Richardson’s
• Ruthless Cuts
• (O’Connell Rapira 2019).
• We dwell unhappily
• in a city built on
• marsh and much
• dirty desperation
• that every generation
• feels.
• How can I escape?

• Feeling responsible makes me weak and raw.
• I’m 14
• and I hate myself.
• My mother is shouting.
• Then all four of us are screaming.
• How can I escape?

• I’m anxious and scared
• and burning all the time
• with shame
• and rage
• my skin
• red and inflamed.
• How can I escape?

• I despise the
• streets of Christchurch
• White trash Skinheads
• middle-class rugby heads
• yelling and screaming
• pumping the gas
• in their loud modified cars
• breaking beer glass after beer glass.
• Thumping heavy metal music,
• petrol fumes and smog
• suffocate me.
• How can I escape?

• Daylight Victorianism:
• Putting on the Avon River
• The Garden City:
• Full of boxed hedges
• colourful roses
• and rhododendrons
• bedded
• in evenly cut squares.
• How can I escape?

• And still,
• my mother
• sits in her chair
• year
• upon year
• unable to muster the care
• I need.
• How can I escape?

• I don’t fit in
• at church
• I’m too queer.
• I don’t fit in
• at any school
• I’m too weird.
• I don’t fit in
• at the university
• I’m too working class,
• too brazen,
• too angry,
• “too much” my mother says.

• I am sculling
• cheap rum for total obliteration.
• Taking pills to make me fly
• out of there.
• Get me out of here.
• How?

• I cut the cord—
• a dripline
• filled with guilt and shame,
• and become
• self-contained.
• Sealed off from my family
• from Christchurch.
• Free from contamination,
• so I may be relieved
• of my miserable responsibility
• and the conservative racist place that stains
• and revolts me.

3. Compost Layer Two: The Fantasy of Purity

• I am in the Tararua Forest Park
• Wairarapa, Aotearoa.
• Far from the dirty White trash streets,
• and Victorian England gardens
• of Christchurch.

• Lush green foliage
• of Indigenous beech and podocarp trees
• flank me.
• Sun streams through
• the leaves gently blowing in the breeze,
• and dances on sparkling clear waters.
• Waterfalls rush and gush over uneven boulders
• pīwakawaka4 flit over the track before me
• Tails fanned.
• They twitter;
• and tūī5 melodiously call,
• shimmering in the light
• with proud white tufts
• on their chests.
• Kererū6 swoop
• Wearing their green purple
• cloak.
• I choke
• On the sublimity—
• the ecstasy—
• the fantasy of purity.

• Hot and sweaty
• I submerge my body
• in fresh mountain water,
• to ease my inflamed skin
• and heart.
• I have escaped!

• I scrub the grit and grime
• of smoggy Christchurch
• the dry dust of barren Canterbury
• from me.

• I wash the pain of guilt and shame
• from my thoughts and flesh,
• blissfully unaware what foolishness
• I was floating in.

4. Compost Layer Three: Trouble a/Underfoot

• But walking back one day,
• under blue skies
• and leafy canopies,
• the bright skies over Tararua began to fade
• and became rather grey
• and cloudy,
• troubling and worrying.
• The tree-colour dulled
• as the sun disappeared
• and the roots became slimy from the rain.
• My feet slipped
• and I fell.
• Branches tore my skin,
• warm trickles of red leaked.
• My hands sank through the dirt
• as I knelt
• on bloody knees
• on muddy leaves
• and Haraway (2008, 2016)
• laughed at me.

• She teased me for thinking I could get away
• with living in a Western Fantasy
• of purity.

• She bellyached over
• the way I pretend I can transcend
• the trouble
• the mud and muddle
• of where I was born:

• White Canterbury
• home of the Crusaders7
• and sheep farmers,
• river punters
• and monarchy lovers,
• where the city of
• Christchurch,
• The Garden City
• has planted over
• Māori histories.

• There is no escape,
• she said.

• I am from my mother,
• mum.
• You are in my face.
• Get out of my face!
• But you can’t.
• And I can’t escape from
• the years of rough touch,
• (like you rubbing my chest with Vicks when I was sick
• and your wedding ring pressing into my skin),
• your motherly love.

• I can’t get rid of the imprints
• we made whilst
• scrambling under the sofa cushions
• for money to buy milk;
• or visiting the hospital
• where we would walk
• so slowly
• to get ice-cream.

• I still remember the nights
• when all four of us would get drunk
• and be happy
• sitting and singing
• in the colonial city,
• a church of Protestant Christ
• apparently.

• Without choice
• threads were formed;
• binds were made;
• knots were tied;
• that bound me to that place.
• and you mum.
• You (and me)
• woven together
• by force
• we who were born from
• ancestors who arrived on
• the First Four Ships—
• part of the White hordes that filled Christ’s Church
• with his Protestant work ethic.

• And so it was in
• my sanctuary,
• my purity
• my family-free fantasy
• that my Christchurch kin came crashing through.
• It was in the soil and sweat of Tararua
• where I leaked my mother
• and her mother
• and my grandmother’s mother
• and my great grandmother’s mother
• and my great great grandmother’s mother
• and my great great great grandmother’s mother,
• the English working-class colonist Elizabeth Harper.
• On my hands and knees I touched them
• as they touched me.

• So it was there,
• skin to soil
• rock, tree trunk,
• bloodied and bruised,
• that I am painfully taught
• history cannot be erased (Barad 2010, p. 266).
• That subjects are formed through encounter,
• and the past is not a relic to be preserved or ignored
• but permanently inside of my limbs and thoughts.
• The past is an act of relation,
• inherited in the flesh.
• “Partners do not pre-exist their relating”
• (Haraway 2008, p. 165):
• Flesh and blood as matter—
• and that matters
• (Barad 2014; Haraway 2008, 2016).

• By virtue of my red flesh and blood;
• My angry anxious upbringing,
• I am always response-able
• towards my family from Christchurch
• and the mess we caused.
• And ignoring that (Bell 2014)
• makes me
• the worst coloniser of all.

5. Compost Layer Four: Inheriting in the Flesh

• Haraway teaches
• fleshy inheritance is what we are made of,
• who we have touched, and retouched,
• who has touched and retouched us,
• human and not,
• over the course of our lives
• and deaths.

• Barad says (Barad 2014, p. 81), “the past is always open”:
• Facing history is
• “to acknowledge and be responsive […] to open oneself up”
• (Barad 2010, p. 264 in Barad 2014, p. 183)
• to our situated stories
• to speak with our material ghosts;
• like feeling generations of the city’s hard winter frosts
• or enduring the memories of squeezing
• into that tight Victorian box.
• Or inhaling the heaviness of Christchurch smog
• season after season:
• To understand that
• our bodies and faces are our inheritances
• and who we are,
• and who we are to become
• (see Barad 2010, p. 264 in Barad 2014, p. 183).
• This is compost—
• kin-in-the-making.

• My mother’s mother is long dead
• but she lives in the frame of my face,
• my nose,
• my body fat and aches.

• Mum’s mum was not a nice woman:
• Self-contained in a hardened shell
• to stop the truth seeping out
• about her father.

• Mum, what have you inherited?

• Before being sent to
• St Joseph’s Catholic Convent School
• away from preying touch,
• nana was a Protestant.

• Her mother,
• Jessie Elizabeth
• born 30 April 1906,
• cleaned the post office
• like nana did when she became a wife and a mother
• (Evans and Evans 1994).

• Cleanliness is next to Godliness
• is the Protestant Work ethic
• that my mum and her three children
• inherited, even if we were Catholic.

• We are
• a White working-class family
• from Church of England, Christchurch
• where the Cathedral sits in the centre.
• But we are not clean
• No matter how hard we scrub
• We are (the) dirt(y) poor.

• Stained with sexual assault,
• thick like blood,
• soaked with crime and alcohol:
• Nobody talks about it—
• instead we all carry it
• in our inflamed flesh.

• Jessie Elisabeth was the daughter of Ethel May.
• Ethel May married a working-class Brown
• From Dunedin8—why did they stay in Christchurch?

• Ethel May and Thomas Brown
• lived in the working-class suburb of
• Woolston.

• Thomas Brown worked at the
• Woolston Tannery (Evans and Evans 1994),
• making flesh and skin
• wearable, bearable.
• The Tannery was opened in 1874
• by Gustav Lindstorm
• cementing Woolston
• as an industrial hub.
• The Tannery is now
• Cassels & Sons Brewing Co,
• my sister’s ‘local’.

• Before she was married
• Ethel May was a Harper,
• the daughter of
• Alfred Benjamin:
• Born in 1856, Heathcote,
• near Woolston
• (Evans and Evans 1994).

• Heathcote:
• The place where
• Dr James Earle
• bought a farm and a plot in town in 1851.
• The going rate was
• 120 pounds for approximately 60 acres
• (Retter 1977).

• Earle was a surgeon,
• the Randolph’s surgeon.
• The Randolph was one of the
• First Four Ships
• that arrived and colonised
• Canterbury in 1850
• (Evans and Evans 1994; Evans 2007; Retter 1977).

• Earle was also a squire’s doctor in Norfolk England
• who employed John Harper.
• So John went from working for the squire,
• to working for the surgeon
• and he and his wife Elizabeth sailed
• to New Zealand,
• to the ‘New World’
• accompanying him
• (Evans and Evans 1994).

• --------------------------------

• It is December 1850.
• Lyttelton
• The Randolph ship arrives
• but the barracks are overcrowded
• tents and shanties have been erected—
• there is no running water,
• there is no sewerage system:
• It is summer in the ‘New World’.
• Elizabeth was used to rough conditions—
• she had given birth to a child on board,
• but not this.
• With new born and toddler, Elizabeth
• refused to find refuge
• in the smelly squalor
• and walked over the hill to the ‘Heathcote’
• (Ōpāwaho) River.
• There she stayed in a cave
• awaiting their new home
• working on the doctor’s farm
• (Evans and Evans 1994).

• Elizabeth’s grit has been inherited by us
• passed through her son Alfred Benjamin.

• The coarse sense of
• staunch independence
• (like when Elizabeth caught her husband cheating
• and sent him to the shed)
• (Evans and Evans 1994)
• is the husbandless Jessie Elizabeth
• When he was imprisoned.

• It is also my husbandless mother
• storming around
• in her raggedy shorts and purple jandals
• lined with grime.
• Her roar at a family perpetrator:
• Her love scratchy but sure.

• My youngest sister too
• blowing plumes of smoke
• steadying her grip and grit,
• matriarch in the making.

• And my niece
• at the tender age of three
• spreading her fire
• everywhere she pleases

• and I laugh so hard when mum tells me
• nana told her husband to eat grass
• from the back yard
• when he asked one night,
• “What’s for tea?”
• and he did.
• And then there is me
• pretending to be
• shy quiet sensitive
• but really,
• as rowdy and abrupt as these women
• that are my family.

6. Compost Layer Five: Responsibility

• Our family inheritance
• is the gruff in our speech
• the clenching of our teeth
• the sweat when we are cleaning
• and the hurt in our feet.

• Our inheritance is open
• ghostly (Barad 2010)
• troubled
• unsettled:
• Handed down, literally
• through tough hands
• and rough touch.

• But the land our family settled on
• was always unsettled.
• and no matter how hard
• we settlers tried
• the foundation of our new homes
• was always going to leak
• the past.

• Christchurch was built on
• Marsh ground—wetlands.
• To the unsettled settlers:
• Swamp, mud, quagmire
• (see Cubrinovski et al. 2011).

• A seasonal sign
• was drainage
• when it rained (Retter 1977, p. 187).

• To cover up the problems
• roads were built because
• tussock-covered streets
• “were no longer acceptable”
• (Retter 1977, p. 187 )
• in a British Colonial City.
• Bridges too were built
• over all the waterways
• so settlers could make their way.
• But floods continued
• to raise problems for
• unsettled settlers
• trying to settle on
• ground made for shifting.

• July 1861
• the Christchurch paper, The Press:
• A plea to the municipal council
• the night fog of the city smells like sewage!
• Settlers are sick
• because of their untreated, uncontained waste (Retter 1977).

• Edward Dobson,
• the provincial engineer,
• proposes a cheap solution:
• Raise the land.
• Raise the level of the streets
• so all manner of runoff
• may run into the rivers (Retter 1977).
• But did anyone ask why drainage was such a problem to begin with?

• Before the passing of
• The Canterbury Association Land Acts,
• that allowed construction of roads, railways canals,
• forests to be felled,
• diversion and damming of rivers and streams and
• the drainage of wetlands for farms and
• building Victorian private properties
• (Fairburn 1989; Waitangi Tribunal 1991, p. 504),
• Christchurch was
• the site of many mahinga kai9
• (Tau et al. 1992).

• 1848 (just two years before
• hordes of colonists arrived on four large ships)
• the “hit-man of colonisation”,
• (Walker 2004, p. 103)
• Governor George Grey
• ordered a hit
• on Kāi Tahu,
• katiaki10 of the largest piece of land
• any iwi11 had
• in the country
• (Waitangi Tribunal 1991).

• Henry Tacy Kemp
• Native secretary to Wellington
• dirty deed appointee
• arrives in Akaroa.

• The beautiful hilly costal land
• That lives in my chest
• Where my mother
• pushed me into the world.
• Where she had me baptised
• and blessed.
• Where we
• walked along the beach together
• where we laughed
• and celebrated my birth
• where we commemorated
• the signing of
• The Treaty of Waitangi12
• Between the Crown and Kāi Tahu…

• Kemp promised to preserve
• ‘reserves’—but he reversed his words.
• He promised partnership—
• it is all in the deed.

• But what kind of partnership can there be?
• when most of that Southern Island
• was sold for 2000 pounds (Waitangi Tribunal 1991)?
• Between 13,551,400 and 20,000,000 acres
• all gone to the Crown.

• Does that make your eyes water?
• It makes mine well.
• So I blink blink blink but
• it is still 2000 pounds.
• Paid in instalments—
• lest the ‘natives’ spend it all
• at once.

• In the end Kāi Tahu
• were given “minuscule” reserves;
• areas in which people were “confined”;
• areas that were “barely capable of maintaining”
• people at “a mere subsistence level” (Waitangi Tribunal 1991, p. 388).

• But all mahinga kai were protected—
• that’s what the deed says, right?
• The English words are written in black and white.

• -------------------

• Kāi Tahu:
• People of Te Wai Pounamu13.
• The island home of Pounamu14
• gifted from the rivers.

• Their mahinga kai:
• The sandy salty estuaries and seas.
• The fresh water wetlands
• plants and trees.
• In fact, what became Canterbury
• was one large mahinga kai actually (Tau et al. 1992).

• Larders brimming with ground birds,
• parrots, ducks,
• eels, flounder, lampreys
• and white bait (O’Regan 1989, pp. 253–54).

• That Kemp promised to protect.
• (Waitangi Tribunal 1991). But instead,
• we shat in them.

7. Compost Layer Six: First Southerners

• Potential partners of compost worlds
• Compost response-ability
• offering “fruitful possibilities”
• for talking with Kāi Tahu.
• Hearing and sharing with Kāi Tahu,
• listening and reciprocating,
• learning our obligations
• (Bell 2014, p. 175).
• Facing our defecation.

• Learning:
• Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
• Honouring promises
• and land deeds.
• Understanding that Kāi Tahu
• would never cede
• their livelihoods,
• their sovereignty, ever
• (Waitangi Tribunal 1991).

• Why would anyone relinquish
• Such bounty?

• Alluvial soil;
• blood lines of rich history;
• veins dug over slowly
• with each other.
• A home
• hundreds of years
• in the making (O’Regan 1989).

• Blood line one, Waitaha:
• From the Ūruao canoe
• east Polynesia (O’Regan 1989).
• Ancient foundations
• for the South
• Te Wai Pounamu (O’Regan 1989; Potiki 2016).

• Blood line two, Mamoe:
• Migrated south
• 16th century.
• Kāti Mamoe
• said to be
• descendants of
• Hotu Mamoe,
• a woman (O’Regan 1989; Potiki 2016).

• Blood line three, Ngāi Tahu:
• From the east
• near where Mamoe used to be.

• Kāi Tahu Whānui15:
• People from a world
• of fishing in double-hulled canoes,
• trekking over mountains
• planting, cultivating
• breeding certain species,
• gardening, hunting,
• subsisting and trading
• prolifically.

• Kāi Tahu:
• People outside our Western self-contained fancies
• of harmony.
• A culture I hardly know of
• not really.

• For Kāi Tahu
• are not an Other
• to soothe our troubled ‘self’
• or a culture to fill our empty shells.

• What have we done?
• What have we become?
• and what are we doing?
• because of that fact-fiction

8. Re-Turning the Compost/Re-Turning (to) Christchurch

• Well, I’m re-turning (to)
• Christchurch
• when kin and kind
• come to mind,
• a Harawayan
• etymological game.
• Words as flesh;
• ancestors.

• Kin and kind:
• Both derive from
• the Greek genos
• and the Latin genus
• showing me how
• ‘race’ and family
• is about belonging,
• where you come from.

• Becoming Pākehā
• is about family
• and nurturing
• our capabilities of response
• not innocently or guiltily
• but staying stuck in the colonial mud,
• the muddle of who we are.

• ---------------------------------------

• It is my sister’s birthday.
• We are sitting at “the brewery” (her local)
• with our mum.
• Woolston Cemetery
• is 120 metres away
• Where Elizabeth Harper (de)composes.
• The Heathcote River flows
• between the cemetery
• and the pub
• where we are sitting—
• where mum’s great grandfather worked
• tanning hides.
• We don’t know this yet.
• We are not a shiny clean
• Family From the Suburbs —
• A family from colonial wealth and
• colourful flowers
• where history records are ordered and kept
• (in expensive furniture—probably old too),
• to show who was and
• who was not on
• The First Four Ships.

• We are working-class muddlers,
• unsettled colonial settlers
• who have inherited our ancestry
• in our jaws, noses and grunt and grit.

• I realise this is me
• learning decoloniality:
• Practising
• not ignoring
• my response-ability (Bell 2014)
• in the place I am from.

• I have only just begun
• and it’s already uncomfortable
• thinking of what I’m sitting on
• in East Christchurch.
• Layers of violent history.
• Our White belonging
• cemented in the dirty streets.

• But I also sense my mother’s warm touch
• and recall that playful glint in her eyes at times
• when she is not so low.
• I feel my sister’s tight hug—
• strength and softness all at once.
• I am lifted by my three year-old niece’s cheeky smile—
• and I feel afflicted, infected
• with compost love (see Haraway 2003, 2016).

• My re-turn to Christchurch
• was not a return from whence I lived
• as an overly anxious responsible youth.
• It was a re-turn:
• A re-turning of Christchurch compost layers
• comprising;
• “a multiplicity of processes,
• such as the kinds earthworms revel in
• while helping to make compost
• or otherwise being busy at work and at play:
• turning the soil over and over—
• ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it,
• burrowing, all means of aerating the soil,
• allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life”
• (Barad 2014, p. 168).

• From within this family then,
• (perhaps like an earth worm)
• I begin to comprehend,
• we, Christchurch Pākehā
• could re-turn
• our attention to the violence we caused
• to pay the price
• of how and why and where we belong.

• We Pākehā do really need
• to sort our shit out.